Are People Who Take Lots of Selfies Really Narcissists?

And finally, there are the self-publicists. These are the people who love documenting their entire lives, say the study authors, and hope to present themselves in a positive light. The classic example? You guessed it: the Kardashians.

To find these selfie types, master’s students in the department of communications gave surveys and follow-up interviews to 46 participants, ages 18 to 45, all of whom had taken multiple selfies in the past. The participants were asked to sort 48 different motivations for taking selfies— “to show off my looks,” for example, or “to discover new sides of myself”—into one of three categories: agree, disagree, or neutral/uncertain.

The participants were then asked to rank their motivations, and answer open-ended questions about the choices they’d made. These results, published in the journal Visual Communication Quarterly, helped the researchers single out specific similarities and differences among the respondents.Next Page